Alyssa Zuercher Reichardt

I’m a PhD candidate in the history department at Yale, where I study eighteenth-century North America and the Atlantic World. This 2016-2017 academic year, I’m an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellow in Early American Literature and Material Texts at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

My dissertation, “War for the Interior: Imperial Conflict and the Formation of North American & Transatlantic Communications Infrastructure, 1729-1774,” examines territorial competition between the French, British, Iroquois, and Cherokee over the long Seven Years’ War. From Kaskaskia and Keowee, to New York and New Orleans, to London and La Rochelle, my work reconstructs how information networks and state-constructed infrastructure knit North America into a larger web of circulation and exchange. Research for this project has been supported by a Bourse Chateaubriand from the Embassy of France, as well as funding from the Omohundro Institute, the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the William L. Clements Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, among others.

My other on-going project, which centers on William Johnson and the Brant family, uncovers a cultural and political campaign to create a genteel Mohawk elite in pre-revolutionary New York.

Before graduate school, I studied at Duke University, where I received an AB in History and Public Policy Studies, as well as a certificate in Documentary Studies.

What is “The Junto?”

The Junto is a group blog made up of junior early Americanists—graduate students and junior faculty—dedicated to providing content of general interest to other early Americanists and those interested in early American history, as well as a forum for discussion of relevant historical and academic topics.